


When the Sun Goes Down

by eastre



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Being a Jaeger Pilot is hard, Being in a relationship is hard, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-29
Updated: 2013-08-29
Packaged: 2017-12-25 00:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/946501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eastre/pseuds/eastre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her fears disappeared as soon as she saw a razor-sharp smile greeting her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Sun Goes Down

 

 

When night fell, Hong Kong turned into a noisy metropolis, filled with countless neon lights glistening in various different colors.

Being kilometers away from the big city, the shatterdome didn’t share its night atmosphere.

Inside the complex, the only kind of noise one could hear was a blend of the chattering of engineers carrying out repairs mixed with the muffled music coming out of some of the rooms, and the footsteps of people coming and going from the cafeteria for a snack or a can of beer.

In the centre of the cafeteria, Mako was sitting at one of the long tables on which, by day, scores of hungry men dined.

The last thing she wanted to do, in that moment, was examine the files on Raleigh Becket. She had all those other things swirling around her head.

Her eyes were fixed on those papers, but her brain wasn’t receiving any kind of input as her lips curled up in a disgruntled grimace. A most distressing situation. Luckily, nobody was around her at the moment, as she hardly thought she could have put up with the Wei triplets’ nosiness or Herc’s worried stares. Most of the pilots and crew were either already sleeping in their quarters or killing time in one way or another, waiting for the next attack. 

Still, Mako had the odd feeling that empty bottles and ashtrays weren’t the only presence in that room. She slowly turned her head, worried about having to be confronted by her dad about why she was still in that place at that ungodly hour. Her fears disappeared as soon as she saw a razor-sharp smile greeting her. 

 

“I’ve been sitting here for an hour and you notice me just now?” Her voice was deep and husky, her Russian accent standing out in her words as her bright red lipstick on her face. Sasha was  sitting a couple of tables behind her, holding a bottle of vodka in her hands and looking at some letters scattered on the table. Slowly, Mako stood up, picking up her papers, her face visibly relaxing.

She and Sasha had been quite close in the past, during their years at the academy, while they trained to become Jaeger pilots. Their age difference made their relationship somewhat difficult to maintain, but Sasha had always been infallibly kind to her.

Mako sat in front of her, somewhat hesitantly, and raised a smile.

“I’m sorry, I was really busy and—“

“You don’t have to apologize, I’m not here to drag you back to your room.” Her hair were flowing, the braids that usually shackled her crown of hair were nowhere to be seen. Mako had envied the color of her hair since when she was little.

After a long time they were looking each other in the eye again, Sasha Kaidanovsky and Mako Mori were part of the women participating in the operation. The only ones who had been chosen to carry out a task of such capital importance. Nobody was exceedingly confident in the Jaegers’ capabilities, and Mako was perfectly aware of that. Too expensive, too hard to maneuver, a cost in human lives too high to be paid. Sasha, on the other hand, had fought to her last breath, together with her husband, to protect the world and her land, yet even in Russia nobody thought they would be able to keep that up for long.

 

The bottle of vodka Sasha held in her fingers was half-full, the brim untouched by any trace of lipstick.

“It’s unusual to see you here at this hour, alone.” She muttered, leaning her chin on the back of her hand, still looking Mako in the eye.

“I could say the same about you, Sasha” The answer came immediately, there was no need to think much: Sasha and Aleksis were virtually inseparable. Where she went, he followed, and vice-versa.

Her raucous laugh startled Mako.

“You’re right, some things look pretty strange. Sometimes I even get asked if we go to the bathroom together.” Sasha laughed again with Mako doing the same. None of the two had ever been known to be fond of talking, yet without realizing it they had gone back to a past in which they both had much lighter burdens on their shoulders.

Mako glanced upon the letters scattered in front of her. They were written in Russian, the handwriting looked tenuous and weak, even though the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet tended to resemble their lands of origin in their shapes marked by a stark and uncompromising harshness.

“They’re from my dad.” She uttered without the slightest hint of embarrassment. She and Mako never talked about anything relating to their families. 

“He’s old and ill, but that doesn’t surprise me, I can bet the slightest breeze of cold air would snap him like a twig.” Her voice had a cynical and distant tinge about it, but Mako didn’t find it surprising. She understood the need for some emotional detachment, in some cases that was the only way in which you can keep yourself from drowning in anguish and despair.

The smell of mold coming from the letters led Mako to think Sasha had been hiding them somewhere for a long time now, somewhere dark and damp, like a wooden box or an old suitcase. Sasha’s thin fingers gripped the bottle tighter and she drank a mouthful of the liquor.

 

Mako  watched her silently without making a sound, as she did years before during the academy training, when she watched her comb her hair. It felt like an eternity had passed and gone by.

“I wanted to be alone for a bit, I wanted to read those without Aleksis watching over me, you know…” She stopped and drew a deep breath. Mako could have sworn she saw her cry, but that never happened. Just her imagination.

“Sometimes it’s difficult, keeping some things to yourself, having a small space where nobody can reach, a space that’s only yours.” Her voice was hoarse now, her accent even more pronounced.

She had stood in silence up until that moment, she knew well that sometimes you didn’t need to talk, to give words to your thoughts. Sometimes you only needed to stay silent, but that time something in her mind suggested her differently.

“It is indeed a dangerous thing, establishing a neural connection between two non-blood-related people. You were joined together as a test, to see if such a connection could have had the same strength as a regular one.” Mako knew what she was saying, she had read their reports and neural interaction analyses countless times.

Sharing your memories and your thoughts with someone who isn’t blood related the way Sasha and Aleksis do seemed like a preposterous idea at first. Sasha knew it well, they had tried several times connecting her with her brother, but in vain, much like trying to connect Aleksis with his own brother.

 

“You’re afraid it won’t work out with Raleigh…” Sasha muttered, looking intently at Mako’s expression.

“How’s it like, being married and piloting a Jaeger together?” Sasha saw that question coming. She stayed silent for the time that it took her to sort the letters out and tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.

The talk Sasha gave her was very long and very difficult, both to begin and to finish.

Talking about how she and Aleksis were sometimes at odds, that was something she had never done with anyone else, simply because nobody noticed certain details. The eyes turned away, the bitter grimaces, the nights spent awake listening to music.

They fought a lot in the past, more than once their training became an excuse to vent the anger and resentment they held towards one another. To her, keeping calm and in control was a second nature, and in those moments her detachment hurt her partner.

Many times during the drifts, when their relationship was still young, she even kicked Aleksis out of her thoughts. She hated the idea of feeling someone inside her head, someone who didn’t belong to her life, a stranger. Aleksis always tried to help her.

 

The more Sasha talked, the more Mako could feel her slightly easing up from her words, which still remained harsh and detached.

“Having a preexistent relationship makes it all much easier, as you said before. We were chosen because we were the best, as individuals.” She stopped for a moment, checking the empty bottle.

“Building such a strong bond and making it a lasting one is a hard thing to do even for brothers, just imagine what it must be for two “strangers”.” Mako perfectly understood that what she was saying was true. She didn’t have -years- to become 100% compatible with Raleigh.

“There are no alternatives, I just -have- to trust…” Mako's words were an almost inaudible whisper, to which Sasha answered nodding silently and then whispered in her native language something Mako couldn’t quite understand at that moment. Her Russian was pretty  basic, after all.

 

In that precise moment, Mako raised her eyes to the entrance to the Cafeteria and gasped, surprised. It was not a ghost or an unwanted guest: Aleksis was leaning on the doorjamb, arms crossed in front of his chest and a piercing gaze looking over the room. He was wearing clothes almost identical to Sasha’s, only several sizes bigger.

Sasha herself was completely unaware of his presence there, so much that she found herself striking a silent grin when she turned her head to find out what had startled Mako that much. Mako hinted a vague nod with her head, to which Aleksis answered raising his eyebrows.

“Now it’s better for me to go, before I find myself forced to sleep just outside my door.” Sasha whispered, leaning forward over the table and giving Mako a smile, followed by a caress.

Mako watched Sasha drop the bottle on the table and pick up the letters, which she then put in a back pocket in her pants, before walking away from the table and going towards her husband. They left, one walking beside the other, their walking paces synchronized, a quirk common among Jaeger pilots but in their case, Mako was sure about that, completely unrelated to their pilot training.

 

Finally alone, Mako ran her hand through her hair, sighed and started gathering her papers, scattered all over the table. A clock on the wall blinked, the electronic display showing it was 2 AM; Mako could have bet that she wouldn’t have slept a single hour in the whole night if she tried to continue working any further.

She spent the walk that separated her from her room thinking about what Sasha whispered to her, that sentence that stuck to her mind and that she managed to translate only when she was in front of her door. 

“…trust is everything” She smiled as soon as those words came out of her mouth, without even thinking.

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> there is going to be a "second part" in the next future  
> -  
> i have to thank a person, who helped me writing and translating this, because without him i'd be lost


End file.
